"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Posted on | October 11, 2016 | Comments Off on Never Trust a ‘Male Feminist’ (And Relevant Thoughts About @JayaSaxena)

You probably never heard of Devin Faraci, who blogs about movies, and perhaps you never would have heard of him had it not been for the fact that Devin Faraci is (a) liberal and (b) stupid, but I repeat myself.

Movie blogger Devin Faraci has stepped down as editor-in-chief of the influential blog, Birth.Movies.Death, after being accused of sexual assault.
In a message to friends and readers, Faraci wrote, “This weekend allegations were made about my past behavior. Because I take these types of claims seriously I feel my only honorable course of action is to step down from my position as Editor-in-Chief of Birth.Movies.Death. I will use the coming weeks and months to work on becoming a better person who is, I hope, worthy of the trust and loyalty of my friends and readers.”
The accusations surfaced on Twitter after Faraci shared his views on video tapes of Donald Trump bragging to “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush about groping women. The movie blogger tweeted that he was “terrified” of the Republican presidential nominee and labeled his running mate, Mike Pence, an “ideological monster.” . . .
Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas owns Birth.Movies.Death, which offers up casting stories, reviews, and trailers for cinephiles. The company declined to comment.

Behind every performatively woke man is a dark past he’s desperately trying to make sure you don’t see. Such appears to be the case with Devin Faraci, film critic at Birth.Movies.Death.—and a man who’s garnered a reputation for being a “good” guy (if not a little holier-than-thou and obnoxious). . . .
The democratization of language has made it incredibly easy for anyone to appear liberal and open-minded. Call enough things “problematic,” ask for men to “do better,” or mention “rape culture” or “gender is a construct,” and you’ve strung together enough buzzwords you don’t have to prove you’ve got the beliefs to back them up. To really be woke, you have to learn to separate the performance from the person. And that’s a lesson marginalized people have had to learn far too often.

Permit me to say that I detest the ideology Jaya Saxena represents, which presumes that “liberal” and “open-minded” are synonymous with virtue, and that adopting the correct “beliefs” is sufficient to allow the liberal to claim moral superiority to others. What does the liberal mean in using “open-minded” as a term of praise? One might ask, for example, whether Jaya Saxena is “open-minded” toward the free-market economic philosophy of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Thomas Sowell, et al. Has she ever read Mises’ Socialism or Hayek’s The Mirage of Social Justice or Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed? If she has not read any of these books, why not? Is Jaya Saxena not “open-minded” to the possibility that her entire left-wing worldview rests upon a foundation of sand? And what about social and cultural issues? Has Jaya Saxena ever read, for example, Christina Hoff Sommers’ Who Stole Feminism? or Daphne Patai’s Heterophobia or Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s The Divorce Culture? What about The Bell Curve or Alien Nation?

What I mean to suggest, you see, is that liberals like Jaya Saxena let their partisan bias as Democrats trap them in an intellectual cocoon where they never encounter any articulate exposition of alternative ideas. Claiming to be “open-minded,” liberals are in fact extremely intolerant, convinced that anyone who disagrees with them is ignorant and/or evil. This tends to make honest discussion about matters of public policy impossible. In the opinion of people like Jaya Saxena, all that is necessary is (a) to determine which is the “liberal” position on any given issue, and then (b) to get enough votes to enact the “liberal” policy. It does not matter whether the consequences of these “liberal” policies are actually beneficial, from this perspective; what matters is that Democrats win elections, so that people like Jaya Saxena can bask in the self-admiration of their “success,” as being On the Right Side of History.

Being an ex-Democrat myself — in 1984, I proudly voted for Walter Mondale, and in 1992, I had a Clinton-Gore bumper sticker on my car — I understand how this kind of partisan prejudice operates to make people blind. If everything you believe about public policy is wrong, as is generally the case with Democrats, the only way to avoid an existential crisis of cognitive dissonance is to ignore any evidence that contradicts your beliefs. You must never pick up a book like P.J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores or Ann Coulter’s Godless with the intention of seriously considering their arguments. Back in the early and mid-1990s, when I undertook the process of critically examining my political beliefs, I plowed through a vast and diverse catalog of books — ranging from classics by Alexis de Tocqueville, Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill to forgotten Cold War obscurities like Blair Coan’s The Red Web — in order to comprehend why events did not match my expectations.

Nearly 25 years have elapsed since I plunged deeply into this study, and I dare say by now that I have read more books by Marx, Engels, Trotsky and Lenin than most Communists ever have, and in the past two years I’ve read more feminist books than has a feminist like Jaya Saxena.

One of four shelves of feminist books I’ve accumulated.

Being “open-minded,” you see, requires us to consider the possibility that we might be wrong, and carefully examine the best arguments against our beliefs in order to know whether or not we are mistaken about important subjects like economics and social policy. Most of my Republican friends are lifelong conservatives, having formed their political identities in their youth, and it never occurs to them that someone like Jaya Sexena might ever be compelled to re-examine her liberal beliefs and partisan allegiance to the Democrats.

Yet if an erstwhile “Yellow Dog” Democrat like me could change course, I think almost any intelligent Democrat must have moments when cognitive dissonance — awareness of the yawning chasm between their liberal beliefs and the stubborn facts of reality — threatens to overwhelm their sense of ideological certainty. Jaya Saxena understands that the “male feminist” is generally a fraud, but what about white people who constantly rant against “racism”? And what about straight people who ostentatiously denounce “homophobia”? For that matter, what about the highly paid AFL-CIO leaders who profess their loyalty to the “working class”? What about left-wing billionaires who claim to care about the oppressed poor? Isn’t it possible that all of these familiar liberal types are every bit as hypocritical as the vagina-grabbing “male feminist” Devin Faraci?

The Democrat Party does not “succeed” on the basis of honest arguments that persuade intelligent people. No, the Democrats are agents of corruption and decadence, who win elections by making dishonest claims that appeal to the worst instincts of ignorant and selfish people.

If Jaya Saxena or any other feminist ever decides she no longer wishes to support the Democrat Party, she should take time to educate herself as to why she has been so badly mistaken. The success of evil is never an accident, and we ought not be deceived as to the origins of evil.